Pala Indian band to buy Warner Springs Ranch

Resort is on land that was once tribe’s home

More than 100 years after government agents marched the tribe out of its ancestral village, North County’s Pala Indian band is getting it back, using $20 million in profits from its casino to buy what is now known as Warner Springs Ranch.

The tribe, San Diego County’s largest, said it plans for the ranch to continue operating as a resort.

“We’re going to keep it the way it is and run it like a business, make it successful,” said Pala Chairman Robert Smith, noting that the tribe is already in the hospitality business through its casino.

The tribe said it has no plans for a casino at Warner Springs, 65 miles and seemingly a world away from downtown San Diego. The 2,522-acre resort features its namesake hot springs, horse trails, a golf course, a landing strip, tennis courts, a dining hall and 250 bungalows, including 17 adobe casitas in which the Pala’s ancestors lived.

Straddling state Route 79, it is located next to the tribe’s old cemetery and a small church built in 1830 by missionaries to the Indians.

Purchasing the ranch seemed out of reach for years.

“It was like a dream for myself and the tribe,” Smith said. “Fifteen years ago, I never thought we’d be able to do it.”

Pala began to set money aside for the purchase in 2001, after opening the casino on state Route 76, hoping to regain what it lost at gunpoint following a U.S. Supreme Court decision, Smith said.

“We’re pretty lucky that when the economy was good, we put away for when this opportunity came up,” he said. “It’s such a good feeling to know we could accomplish it.”

The purchase still has to go through escrow, Smith said, but the decision a couple of weeks ago by two-thirds of the resort’s owners was the biggest hurdle. The resort is held by 2,000 individual ownerships, most sold for $30,000 or more to families from Southern California and beyond in the 1980s with the promise of having the option to stay at the resort.

If the sale goes through, each ownership will get about $10,000.

“We’re one step closer, optimistically, to getting back our original homeland,” Smith said. “It’s been a long process.”

The vast majority of the 900 or so Pala tribal members consider themselves Cupeños, meaning they trace their history to the place they know as “Cupa,” where their ancestors lived for centuries near a bubbling hot spring northwest of Julian.

Many recall relatives who, in 1903, were uprooted and marched 39 miles in three days with all their belongings to the Pala Indian Reservation. By order of the federal government, they joined the Luiseño Indians living there.

The Pala consider that federal action their own “Trail of Tears,” a reference to the removal of about 16,000 Cherokee from the Southeast to what is now Oklahoma in 1838. Thousands died during the trip and as a result of the relocation.

In the Cupeños’ case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1901 that they didn’t have title to the land they had long occupied. The court ruled the title belonged to John G. Downey, a former California governor and successor to a 48,000-acre Mexican land grant given to an Easterner named Jonathan Turnbull Warner.

In the ensuing years, the stagecoach stop became a Hollywood hangout, with celebrities such as writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and actors and directors including Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and John Wayne spending time in the resort’s adobe casitas and near pools filled with water from the natural sulfur springs.

In the 1980s, San Francisco hotelier and developer A. Cal Rossi turned the ranch into an ownership resort, with those who bought having the ability to stay and the responsibility for part of the upkeep.

While initially successful — 1,400 shares were ultimately sold — the resort fell victim to changing times. Families spent less and less time there; some stopped coming and paying their dues.

By last year, despite deferred maintenance, dues had risen to $382 a month, and owners couldn’t find anybody willing to buy their share.

It took the better part of the year to get two-thirds of the owners to agree to a sale, with the tribe ultimately buying 40 or so ownerships to get to the necessary number.

The tribe told owners they would have the opportunity to return to Warner Springs Ranch, but as paying customers, said Richard Bye, president of the resort’s board.

“The majority of the board is happy with it,” Bye said. “It’s the people that count, and over two-thirds of them assented to the sale.”

The decision to sell wasn’t difficult for owner John Meana of North Carolina, who inherited part of an ownership share from his late brother.

“I’m not able to use that out there, but I keep writing the check,” Meana said. “The Pala Indians need their property back, and I don’t want to pay for it anymore.”